Sleight (8 page)

“She didn’t know what had happened. Benjamin, her attribute is not common. Your young friend, possesses an attribute that I’ll need to discuss with a colleague, straight away.” He clasped his hands, his eyes wide and glinting in the filtered sunlight.

I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND why he needed to consult with someone when it seemed pretty obvious that Justine’s knack was the same as Sonja’s. Despite my excited demands for an explanation he had quickly dismissed me and picked up the ancient corded phone on the desk to make a phone call. The abrupt end to our conversation shouldn’t have surprised me, it was how he operated, but following what had been the most engaged conversation we had ever shared it was irritating.

Getting up from the chair I lazily walked through the halls and decided to look in on Mr. Goodturn. After assuring myself that he was comfortable, I quietly closed the door to his room, and left the apartment. Riding the elevator down I debated whether checking in on Breno again was necessary. As I walked through the pawnshop I felt guilty that it had been closed all day. Kenwoode had said that the income from the shop wasn’t necessary to support Mr. Goodturn or his other business dealings. He’d called it little more than a hobby. In just one day there was a fine layer of dust collecting along the counter surface. When I opened the door and walked out the bell on the door jingled. It struck me as wistful.

Lifting my face to the sky I felt the sun’s warmth despite the cold winter breeze, and reminisced about the many times Maddy and I had spent afternoons together when the weather was good. I’d shot off a couple of texts to her before I’d gone to bed and other than one short response hadn’t gotten anything else from her. We had been very close but had never truly crossed the line into the boyfriend-girlfriend zone. My legitimate reasons for adopting a low profile on social media didn’t help when it came to staying in touch with her either.

As I entered my apartment building I pushed away painful thoughts of Maddy. I reasoned that I’d only been away for a little over an hour so I didn’t think Breno needed a check-in just yet. I’d spent a lot of the day on my feet and my leg was starting to ache. Looking at the stairs I wished for the umpteenth time for an elevator.

I was distracted so that’s my excuse for what came next.

Rounding the last flight and stepping onto the landing between the third and fourth floors I was immediately aware of someone on the stairs above me but couldn’t react quickly enough before I was tackled. My attacker was bigger and stronger than me and he forcefully wrapped an arm around my neck from behind and thumped my head against the floor. A stale odor of sweat filled my nostrils as I gasped for breath and struggled to get out of the headlock, pulling at the arm with my hands. My head was pulled back and I could tell he was planning on smashing my face into the floor again. Fighting against instinct I stopped trying to loosen his grip and dropped my right hand down and under my sweatshirt. Using my knack I softened my face-plant by influencing the space directly in front of my head and at the same time pulled my stun gun out of its holster. My forehead bumped against the floor, although less painfully. Using my knack again I forced the two of us into a body roll while I jammed the gun into what I sincerely hoped was his neck and pulled the trigger.

There are times when things don’t work the way you expect them to, you make the right move, plan the appropriate second move and things go wrong. Then there are the times where it works perfectly.

This was one of those perfect times. 

A heartbeat after I pulled the trigger the arm around my neck fell away and the weight of my assailant’s body separated from mine. Sucking in a lungful of air, I scrambled away and got to my feet.

Sprawled on the floor was a kid roughly my own age. I rubbed my neck but other than some possible bruising I figured I’d live. Quickly patting him down to satisfy myself that he wasn’t carrying any weapons, I took his wallet. Congratulating myself on saving my own ass I came to the slow realization that now I had a problem on my hands. I was at a loss as to what to do with him. A low moan escaped his lips and his head moved a little. Feeling no remorse whatsoever I juiced him again and he lay still.

Using my knack I could easily get him downstairs but where to? I wanted to know why the hell he had jumped me before I got rid of him, and I didn’t want him coming back for another try.

Flipping open his wallet I checked for ID and received another surprise: Trey Canty. He was a junior at my school. The date on the ID was for the current school year, so he was busy mugging fellow students during the holiday season in between shopping for gifts. Getting a shoulder under one of his arms and using my knack to take up some of the weight I half dragged, half carried him up the remaining flight of stairs to the fourth floor and my apartment.

I knacked open my door, pulled him in and dumped him on the floor. Grabbing a chair from the dinette I carried it over to where he was sprawled. I grabbed a roll of duct tape from a cabinet in the kitchen. It took me less than ten minutes to get him in the chair and securely tape him to it. I wrapped a piece of tape around his head and over his mouth, just about the time he started to come around.

His eyelids fluttered and he shook his head, groaned and winced. After a few minutes of fuzziness he looked up, and his eyes went wide. Then he started struggling. The tape held fine and reduced his attempts to get free to little more than scooting the chair along the floor. His eyes snapped back in my direction and were so wide I could see white around the iris in each one.

“I Tased you bro’,” I smirked.

No reaction. I figured he must not watch YouTube or Cops on TV.

“Stop jerking the chair around, you’re gonna scratch the floor.”

He stopped moving.

“Before I let you go we’re gonna figure some stuff out together. ‘Kay?”

Eyes still registering a significant level of freak-out, he nodded his head.

“You’ve probably seen this routine in the movies: I’m going to remove the tape over your mouth, but if you start hollering I’m going to jam this,” I raised the stun gun and pulled the trigger once releasing a bright spark and a loud snapping noise, “into your armpit and we’ll have to start over. Understand?”

He nodded again. It seemed almost too easy.

Removing the tape, not worrying much that some hair and skin came off when I did it, I stepped back to get another look at him. Short sandy-colored hair, muscular build, big features including a pair of ears that would have looked better on a water pitcher, and a wide thin-lipped mouth. Then I realized who he was. He played on the varsity football team.

“Okay, Trey. Tell me why coming to my apartment building and jumping me in the hall was such a good idea.”

He looked down and took a deep breath. Shaking his head he glanced up but wouldn’t make eye contact. “I was just supposed to mess you up a little and give you a message,” he grumbled.

“Message? From who?” I asked, although I thought I knew where this was going to lead.

Not immediately responding, he looked around, and then hung his head again. “I’m not supposed to tell you that.”

Now it sounded even more like the movies. This was the part where the rogue cop would torture the bad guy and eventually get the info he needed. Problem: other than another zap from the gun I wasn’t prepared to torture him.

But he didn’t have to know that.

“You might want to rethink that; you have bigger problems to worry about,” I said, trying to weave a little melodramatic menace into my voice while I waggled the stunner near his face.

Heaving a heavy sigh he looked out my windows and grimaced. “He’s got stuff on my girlfriend. Photos. If I tell him how this went down she’s screwed, and so am I.”

“Let’s try this a different way then, what was the message?” I asked feeling even more certain that I knew who had sent him.

Looking up he stared at the ceiling, trying to recall something. “He said to tell you to remember to mind your own business and that he hoped everyone you cared about was okay.” He shook his head in disgust, but I couldn’t tell if he was disgusted with himself or with the message he’d been asked to deliver.

The message confirmed what I’d been suspecting. Not that it was going to make a huge difference. I still wanted to nail it down. “So what does Baffle have on your girlfriend?” I asked.

That got his attention. “Don’t tell him I told you!” he gasped. I marveled at Baffle’s lack of sophistication. The kid could make a computer dance, got great grades but he wasn’t swift enough to realize that the message he had asked to have delivered would immediately reveal who had sent it. Dumb, in a common sense kind of way.

Nodding, I said, “Don’t worry. I have a plan for how you and I are going to work this out, and you can go along with your life.”

“You’re not like he said you were. He said you were kind of dumb.” He winced as he said it, realizing that dissing someone who had you taped to a chair wasn’t the smartest thing you could do.

I laughed. “Yeah, that sounds like him, and so does the blackmail.”

Flexing his arms and shoulders he gritted his teeth and sighed again. “So, what’s the plan?”

“First, I’ll un-tape you, but if you try to take a swing at me I’ll put you down again. Cool?”

“I guess.” He frowned.

“Second, you’re going to tell Baffle that this whole thing worked just the way it was supposed to. You roughed me up, gave me the message and that was it. When I get back to school I’ll back your story if it ever becomes necessary. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“The third thing is something for the future and you’ll need to think it over carefully before you agree, because if you do agree to it, and you mess me over, I’ll make you regret it. But I don’t want it to come to that. You and I are sort of on the same side. Baffle does his best to get over on people and use them. But it won’t stop. He’s got something on your girlfriend? He’s gonna keep messing with you until you and your girlfriend get out from under it. So, here’s what I’m proposing...”

BY THE TIME I finished up with Trey and planted the seeds for dealing with Baffle it was late in the afternoon and close to dinner time. The hand pie and latte had been forever ago and I was starved. Here’s a problem that’s specific to a teenager living without parental supervision: the fridge and pantry are never stocked, and if they are it usually isn’t anything all that healthy or filling.

It was getting dark outside and one of my personal rules was to avoid being caught out at night alone. But, there was a new sandwich shop just two blocks away and I figured that my stun gun and my knacks would keep me safe. Besides, I was feeling pretty proud of myself for the way I’d taken down Trey. As I thought about another trip downstairs though, I grimaced. How many in one day would that make?

Making it to the lobby as quickly as I thought safe I was in front of Breno’s door in record time. He took his time answering.

Cracking the door a few inches he peered out at me. “Hi Benny.”

“Hey, I was just checking in on you and making sure you were okay.”

His eyes travelled a slow lazy arc and came back to rest on me. “Yah. I’m fine.”

“You, sure? You have anything for dinner?” I asked, wondering why he was being evasive.

“Oh, yah. I got soup. And I got crackers,” he said, brightly.

“Alright. I’m going out but I’ll be back.”

Without even saying goodbye he closed the door. If I hadn’t know him so well I’d have sworn he was acting guilty, but he did deserve his privacy and I hadn’t smelled even a hint of smoke. I promised myself that I would visit him on my way upstairs after I got back. I was feeling confident as I turned to walk down the hall toward to the street. It was a bit chilly outside and I wished that I’d put on a heavier jacket but I wasn’t willing to climb the stairs again. The walk was short but my stomach was rumbling before I even got to the shop’s front door. It was called The Grub Stop and featured fresh-baked bread and fresh sliced to order meats and veggies. It was counter service which was fine with me. I grabbed my order after a short wait, and took a seat at the long bar running along the windows facing Seneca Street. Smiling, I bit into my grilled Reuben, a little juice running down my chin. When I happened to look out the window I almost choked.

Walking down the street and heading for the waterfront was the one-eyed weasel that had been part of the duo that had kidnapped me and Justine. Wearing a gray windbreaker, black jeans and black boots he practically blended in with the surrounding buildings, which considering what he did for a living was probably the whole idea. His hair was long and flopped back and forth as he walked. I won’t lie: I smiled a little when I saw the eyepatch. The little creep had been getting ready to blow me into oblivion when I’d hit him there with a card I’d thrown.

Cramming two huge bites into my mouth and forcibly washing it down with a swig of soda, I hurried to get outside before he disappeared from view. His bow-legged swaying gait and the floppy hair made it easy for me to spot him across the street. Impatiently waiting for the light to turn green I loped after him to close the distance between us. He was moving in an unhurried but purposeful way that was taking him down toward the waterfront.

I followed him for several blocks. We were getting pretty far from my neighborhood and the sun was dropping fast. I hung back about fifty feet but he never looked back. I wondered how he had gotten back on the streets after his involvement in the kidnapping, especially considering that he had already been in custody at the hospital where he’d been receiving care for his injuries.

He crossed over First Street and walked past the no-man’s land between First and the waterfront and turned right heading toward the lower portion of Pike Place. And in the direction of the burned out pier. There were fewer pedestrians so I allowed the distance between us to grow and hugged the buildings and doorways as I manifested my camouflage knack. As he drew closer to Pier 55 he started acting more secretive, frequently looking around and moving more erratically. He looked over his shoulder and dodged behind a massive concrete pillar that supported the freeway viaduct. I stopped and waited. When a couple of minutes went by and he didn’t reappear I carefully made my way to the pillar where he’d vanished.

Keeping my camouflage in place I edged around the pillar and found nothing. A moment of frustration passed when I noticed a metal square set in the ground immediately adjacent to the pillar. It was hinged on one side. On the leading edge there was a finger-sized gap between the metal and the ground. Hesitating for only a moment I got my hand under it and started to lift it, using my knack to help. The hinge didn’t make a sound and the metal cover was actually very light. As I opened it all the way I saw metal rungs set in the wall of a square shaft that yawned below me.

That made me pause. I looked out at the water and realized that the sun would be setting soon. The freeway overpass made the area where I was standing even more shadowy. A gust of wind whipped through, sending exhaust fumes and dust drifting around me. My early months in Seattle had taught me a few lessons and caused me to develop some rules. One of those was not to be caught on the streets after dark.

I had my phone and a flashlight app so I wouldn’t be blind but I was also following him into an area that I was unfamiliar with and all by my lonesome. I reached under my sweatshirt and touched the stunner for a little reassurance and started down, leaving the metal door open above me. The floor was about twenty feet down and looked level. As I began climbing down I worried that it might be a sewer duct and that I’d be shuffling through sludge. The tunnel was square, tall enough that I could stand, and only went in one direction as it dead-ended at the ladder rungs. Shafts of weak light pierced the darkness at regular intervals, spearing down from grates up on the street level. Leaving my phone off and using my camouflage knack I moved in the direction of the piers.

At about a hundred feet the tunnel sloped down and the dim light from above disappeared. I dropped my camouflage and pulled my phone out, waking up the screen and holding it so that I could see a few feet in front of me. The slope leveled out and the floor surface changed from concrete to metal. Moving slowly so that I didn’t make a lot of noise, I traveled another fifty feet and noticed condensation on the walls. A rotten moldy odor became stronger the further I went.

The floor surface reverted back to concrete covered in loose grit, and every step I took produced what felt like ridiculously loud crunching under my feet. Feeling very vulnerable and fearing discovery, I was beginning to consider turning around when I came upon two doors. One was covered with high voltage warning signs and the other was labelled plainly ‘stairs’. Turning on the flashlight app I scanned the floor in front of each door and then played the light up to the door handles. The handle to the door that led to the stairs was dirty and covered with an undisturbed layer of dust. The other door handle was relatively shiny and there was a single wet footprint in front of it. Using my knack I opened the door and grabbed the stun gun with my free hand as I stepped over the threshold into a dark hallway. I pulled a coin from my pocket and placed it in the door frame so that the door wouldn’t close completely.

With my phone in my left hand as my light source I moved forward past banks of gigantic circuit breakers with huge levers as big as my arm all pushed in the ‘off’ position. I swung the phone’s light ahead and let it play over the walls and floor. There was another door at the end of the narrow space. As I approached it I heard muffled voices. When I put my ear to it I could hear the voices more clearly.

I agonized over whether I should risk opening the door. I didn’t see how I could be satisfied following him all this way just to chicken out at this point. Taking a deep breath I used my knack to open the door as slowly and carefully as possible, while pointing my feet and angling my body to make a hasty retreat if One-Eye was on the other side of the door. I had it opened about two inches when a loud voice boomed out, and I just about wet my pants. It was all I could do to reassert my control over the door before it banged shut, as I realized that the voice hadn’t been in response to my opening it. Letting out shallow ragged breaths I opened the door wide enough to slip through and used another coin to keep it from latching closed.

The room I entered was dimly lit by a light source coming from around a corner that was fifteen or twenty feet ahead. The yellow light wavered and jumped around, which probably meant that the source was a candle or a gas lantern. Between me and the corner were just blank walls and floor, with nothing to hide behind and nowhere to run except back through the doorway I’d just entered. The voices carried and I could hear what sounded like the legs of chairs scraping the floor.

“…tell me that then
Wendell!
” came a familiar sounding baritone.

“You know I don’t like it when you call me that, Tank. I like plain ol’ Dell,” came the thin raspy voice that I knew belonged to One-Eye. I marveled over the name of Dell’s fellow thug, Tank. My memory of that voice was associated with a huge Neanderthal. It had to be a nickname.

Brilliant and deeply imaginative.

“Well,
Wendell
, I’ll call you shit-for-brains if it suits me. Why are you here? What have you got?” rumbled the deep-voiced Tank.

“I got plenty. Where is she? She was supposed to be here and why are we meeting down here anyway. We should be meeting her in her fancy-ass waterfront condo instead of this hellhole.”

Invoking my camouflage I tried to decide where I would be safest if they came around the corner unexpectedly. I decided on a spot on the wall to my right midway between the door and the corner. I figured when they walked around the corner they would probably hug the wall to their right, which would be on my left. By stationing myself along the opposite wall I would reduce the risk of them running into me. I just had to hope my camouflage would hide me effectively.

Meanwhile, Tank was ripping on Del again. “That’s for her to decide and by now you should know that. You think we would blend in there? No. She’s smart. Unlike you. You should be thanking her for getting you out. What did you find?”

There was a pause which could have meant anything but based on the conversation it was probably Dell pouting before he continued. What he said next made the hair on my neck stand straight up.

“He’s back in his apartment, so it should be easier than messing with the shop and the old dude.” Del said, with more than a little pettiness creeping into his voice.

Tank snorted, “That all you got? Two weeks and that’s it? He’s sleeping in his own bed?”

“NO! That’s not all I got! And if it’s so easy why ain’t you doing it?” spat Del.

“You know why you little bitch. What else?” snapped Tank, clearly reaching the end of his obviously short temper.

“Okay, okay,” whined Del. “We got some kinda competition. There was a big kid that was hanging around. Didn’t look like he was wantin’ to party if ya know what I mean.”

“I don’t. What was he doing?” growled Tank.

“Sorta hanging around, like he was trying to ambush the kid. An’ there’s another kid scoping out the place but I didn’t get a good look at ‘im. Small. Sneaky,” Del said.

That was probably Justine and the other, bigger kid, was almost for sure my new best buddy Trey. My stomach felt queasy as I realized that these creeps had been watching my apartment building and that they had been doing it for Sonja. I’d learned enough and decided that I should start backtracking when Tank spoke again.

“Kids? That’s not a problem, especially since I wasted the Mexican. That dude was a problem. So, he’s back at home? That it, or is there more?”

Del cleared his throat, “The dummy’s back too. The kid musta brought him back home. He’s only back maybe a day. Ain’t been out though. Stayin’ holed up in his ground floor apartment.”

“Now see, that there is important. We both owe that son of a bitch some payback. That’ll move up the time table. As in right away. Like possibly tomorrow. That prick created some serious damage when we tried to grab him. I don’t know about you but I’m tired of parting my hair different because of what he did to my face, although with you maybe it was an improvement.” Del made a rude noise before Tank continued, “She’s not gonna be happy that he’s back in the picture. He burned her bad. It complicates things. Unless...” Tank’s voice trailed off and I panicked thinking that I had overstayed my welcome and that I was about to be discovered. I started edging back to the door.

Dell’s whiny voice floated after me. “What? Unless what?”

Low, ugly laughter echoed through the confined space. “Maybe we’ll upgrade this whole project to a twofer!”